Diana Biography
Diana did not belong on Mount Targon. A group of Solari hunters discovered her swaddled between her frost-claimed parents—strangers to this land, who had clearly traveled a long way. The hunters brought her to their temple, dedicated her, and raised her as a member of the Tribes of the Last Sun, known to many as the Rakkor.
Like all of the Solari faith, she underwent rigorous physical and religious training. However, unlike others, Diana was determined to understand why the Solari act the way they do, and the reasoning behind their beliefs. She spent her evenings digging through the libraries, devouring texts with only pale moonlight to read by. Paradoxically, this pursuit provided more questions than answers, and her teachers’ aphoristic replies did little to sate her inquisitive mind.
When Diana began to notice tomes had whole chapters torn from them, and all references to the moon seemed missing, the teachers assigned harsh punishments, intending to exhaust her into devotion. Likewise, her fellow acolytes distanced themselves from her and her questioning.
There was one shining beacon in these years of confused, frustrated isolation: Leona. The most devout of Diana’s peers, they often found themselves in impassioned debate. Though one never swayed the other in their long and frequent conversations, they developed a close friendship.
Then, one glorious night, Diana discovered a hidden alcove deep within the mountain. Moonlight spilled against its walls, revealing imagery of the sun, of soldiers armored in gold alongside silver-clad warriors, and matching imagery of the moon, atop Targon’s greatest peek. Delighted, Diana raced to share this clear message with Leona—the sun and moon were not enemies after all!
Leona did not react with joy.
She urged Diana to put this heresy from her mind entirely, warning of the punishments that may befall her if she were to voice such thoughts to others. Diana had never seen her serious friend quite so grave.
Frustration gnawed at her. She had reached the end of the Solari’s knowledge, yet not even Leona would take this new discovery into account. What were the Solari hiding? Increasingly, Diana felt certain there was only one place she could go for answers: the top of Mount Targon.
The climb tested her in every way imaginable, and time seemed to stand still as she scaled the peak. To survive, she focused her thoughts on her lone companion, and the answers that would make the Solari better, more whole.
The summit greeted her with the brightest, fullest moon she’d ever seen. After a rapturous moment, a pillar of moonlight slammed into her and she felt a presence taking hold of her, sharing glimpses of the past, and of another Rakkor faith called the Lunari. Diana realized this presence could only be one of the legendary Aspects… and she had been chosen as its host.
When the light dissipated, her mind was again her own. Diana found herself clad in armor, holding a crescent blade, and hair once dark hair now gleaming silver. She turned to find she was not alone—Leona stood at her side, similarly bedecked in shining, golden battleplate, a sunbreak-bright shield and sword in her hands.
Diana was overjoyed to share in this revelatory moment with her friend, but Leona thought only of returning to the Solari. Diana begged her not to, desperate that they face this new future together. But Leona refused, and their disagreement quickly turned into a titanic battle, erupting with moonlight and sunfire.
Fearful of losing herself to the Aspect’s power, Diana ultimately fled down the mountain. But, vindicated in her search, she felt more certain than ever that she had been right to question the Solari’s teachings. It was time to confront them, and show the error of their ways.
Pushing past their Ra’Horak guardians, Diana burst into the chambers of the high priests. They listened with mounting horror as she told of what she had learned of the Lunari… and then they denounced her as a heretic, a blasphemer, and a peddler of false gods. Rage filled Diana, amplified by the Aspect within, and she embraced it in a terrible burst of moonlight. Startled, she fled the temple, leaving a trail of death in her wake.
Now, driven by half-remembered visions and glimpses of ancient knowledge, Diana clings to the only truths she knows for certain—that the Lunari and the Solari need not be foes, and that there is a greater purpose for her than to be a Solari acolyte of Mount Targon.
And though that destiny remains unclear, Diana will seek it out, whatever the cost.
Diana Story
Night had always been Diana’s favorite time, even as a child. It had been that way since she was old enough to scramble over the walls of the Solari temple and watch the moon traverse the vault of stars. She looked up through the dense forest canopy, her violet eyes scanning for the silver moon, but seeing only its diffuse glow through the thick clouds and dark branches.
The trees were pressing in, black and moss-covered, their branches like crooked limbs reaching for the sky. She could no longer see the path, her route forward obscured by rank weeds and grasping briars. Wind-blown thorns scraped the curved plates of her armor, and Diana closed her eyes as she felt a memory stir within her.
A memory, yes, but not her own. This was something else, something drawn from the fractured recollections of the celestial essence that shared her flesh. When she opened her eyes, a shimmering image of a forest overlaid the close-packed trees before her. She saw the same trees, but from a different time, from when they were young and fruitful and the path between them was dappled with light and edged in wildflowers.
Raised in the harsh environs of Mount Targon, Diana had never seen a forest like this. She knew what she was seeing was an echo of the past, but the scents of honeysuckle and jasmine were as real as anything she had experienced.
“Thank you,” she whispered, following the spectral outline of the ancient path.
It led Diana through overgrown and withered trees that ought to have been long dead. It climbed the slopes of rocky highlands, and passed through stands of twisted pine and wild fir. It crossed tumbling mountain streams and wound its way around sheer slopes before bringing her to a rocky plateau overlooking a vast lake of cold, dark water.
At the center of the plateau was a circle of towering stones, each carved with looping spirals and curving sigils. On every stone Diana saw the same rune that shimmered upon her forehead and knew she had reached her destination. Her skin tingled with a sense of febrile anticipation, a sensation she had come to associate with wild and dangerous magic. Wary now, she approached the circle, eyes scanning for threats. Diana saw nothing, but she knew something was here, something utterly hostile and yet somehow familiar.
Diana moved to the center of the circle and drew her sword. Its crescent blade glittered like diamond in the wan moonlight penetrating the clouds. She knelt with her head bowed, the blade’s tip resting on the ground, its quillons at her cheeks.
She felt them before she saw them.
A sudden drop in pressure. A raw charge to the air.
Diana surged to her feet as the spaces between the stones split apart. The air buckled and a trio of screeching beasts charged her with ferocious speed; ivory flesh, bone-white carapaces of segmented armor and steel talons.
Terrors.
Diana dived beneath a snapping jaw filled with teeth like polished ebony, slashing her sword in an overhead arc that clove the first monster’s skull to its heavy shoulders. The creature fell, its flesh instantly unraveling. She rolled to her feet as the others circled like pack hunters, now wary of her gleaming blade. The creature she had killed now resembled a pool of bubbling tar.
They came at her again, one from each side. Their flesh was already darkening to a bruised purple, hissing in this world’s hostile atmosphere. Diana leapt over the leftmost beast and swung her sword in a crescent arc towards its neck plates. She yelled one of the Lunari’s holy words and incandescent light blazed from the blade.
The beast blew apart from the inside, gobbets of newly-wrought flesh disintegrating before the moonblade’s power. She landed and swayed aside from the last beast’s attack. Not fast enough. Razored talons punched through the steel of her pauldrons and dragged her around. The beast’s chest split apart, revealing a glutinous mass of sense organs and hooked teeth. It bit into the meat of her shoulder and Diana screamed as numbing cold spread from the wound. She spun her sword, holding the grip like a dagger and rammed it into the beast’s body. It screeched, relinquishing its hold. Steaming black ichor poured from its ruptured body. Diana spun away, biting down on the pain racing around her body. She held her moonblade out to the side as the clouds began to thin.
The beast had tasted her blood and hissed with predatory hunger. Its armored form was now entirely gloss black and venomous purple. Bladed arms unfolded and remade themselves in a fan of hooks and talons. Unnatural flesh flowed like wax to seal the awful wound her blade had ripped.
The essence within Diana surged. It filled her thoughts with undying hatred from a distant epoch. She glimpsed ancient battles so terrible that entire worlds had been lost in the fires of their waging; a war that had almost unmade this very world and still might.
The creature charged Diana, its body rippling with the raw power of another realm of existence.
Clouds parted and a brilliant shaft of silver speared downwards. Diana’s sword drank in the radiance of distant moons and light burned along its edge. She brought it down in an executioner’s arc, cleaving plated bone and woven flesh with the power of the night’s illumination.
The beast came apart in an explosive detonation of light, its body utterly unmade by her blow. Its flesh melted into the night, leaving Diana alone on the plateau, her chest heaving with exertion as the power she had joined with on the mountain withdrew to the far reaches of her flesh.
She blinked away after-images of a city that echoed with emptiness where once it had pulsed with life. Sadness filled her, though she had never known this place, but even as she mourned it, the memory faded and she was Diana again.
The creatures were gone and the stones of the circle gleamed with threads of silver radiance. Freed from the touch of the hateful place on the other side of the veil, their healing power seeped into the earth. Diana felt it spreading into the landscape, carried through rock and root to the very bones of the world.
“This night’s work is done,” she said. “The way is sealed.”
She turned to where the moon’s reflection shimmered in the waters of the lake. It beckoned to her, its irresistible pull lodged deep in her soul as it drew her ever onwards.
“But there is always another night’s work,” said Diana.
